If you've ever gone blonde, your stylist has most likely recommended a purple shampoo for regular at-home toning. Just like blonde hair, grey silver hair will benefit significantly from a salon-quality purple shampoo.
Purple shampoo is a toning shampoo specially designed for blonde hair, silver hair, bleached hair, or brassy hair. It features crushed violet pigments that neutralize style-ruining brassy and yellow tones.
If your silver hair has started to turn a bit brassy, then you'll absolutely love the Redken Color Extend Graydiant purple shampoo.
Clairol Shimmer Lights Shampoo
It can help enhance natural grays and refresh color in faded highlights. Overuse of this shampoo can dry out your hair due to its purple pigments, so it may not be a good choice for dry or damaged hair. For best results, leave the product in your hair for 5 to 10 minutes before rinsing.
Therefore, applying purple shampoo will neutralize yellow undertones in your hair. Meanwhile, blue shampoo will neutralize orange undertones in your hair. According to color theory, brunettes should reach for a blue shampoo. Purple shampoos, on the other hand, are better for blondes, silver or grey hair.
Purple shampoo neutralises brassiness but enhances blonde pigmentation. To maintain a silver shade, your shampoo requires a stronger colour neutralisation. Silver shampoo is formulated with deeper purple pigments to target yellow tones in a much stronger way.
How Often Should You Use Purple Shampoo? Purple shampoo is meant to only be used weekly or when your hair is looking brassy — not every day. Generally, you'll want to incorporate it into your hair care routine one to three times a week in place of your usual shampoo for color-treated hair.
DON'T use purple shampoo before your colour appointment
As Anneliese said, it's important not to use purple shampoo in the run-up to your colouring appointment. “Stop using purple shampoo a week or so before you have your colour done,” advises Jimmy.
If you have platinum, gray, or silver hair, you can leave the purple shampoo on for up to 30 minutes, depending on how brassy or discolored your hair is.
To get silver hair, you have to bleach your hair until your strands are almost white. The darker your natural color is, the more bleach sessions you'll have to go through to lighten your hair enough to achieve that ethereal silver hue. The bleaching process can be very damaging to your delicate mane.
To combat silver hair's tendency to adopt a brassy tone, you can commit to using a shampoo or conditioner with purple or blue pigments at least twice a month. This is super effective in preserving your silver hair tone because of the types of molecules that purple shampoo contains.
Using a purple shampoo on grey hair can help to remove brassy yellow shades, leaving you with a flattering silver undertone.
Warm skin tones, for example, look beautiful when silver hair has a very slight peachy hue to it. Cooler skin tones, however, really pop against silver hair with a bluish shimmer to it. Neutral skin tone? You're lucky and can pull off a whole range of silver shades!
Grey hair has very little melanin, while white hair has no melanin at all. As you go through the aging process, your hair might turn grey before going completely white. For some, this process is so drastic that the hair simply turns silver and then white.
Silver hair turns blonde after washing due to the fact that silver pigmentation similar to the pigments found in the pastel dyes for hair, are surprisingly weak. Therefore the silver hair tends to fade to blonde, regardless of whether you apply permanent or semi-permanent silver hair colour.
For best results, use a purple conditioner after rinsing with your purple shampoo. You may want to wash hair with your purple system twice to thrice a week, depending on your blonde level.
"Alternate your purple shampoo with a moisturizing shampoo," says Wiley. "Depending on how brassy your blonde hair is, you won't need to use the toning effects every wash, and it is important to add moisture and strengthen hair during the color process to keep hair healthy and strong."